firmware

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Arm Techcon 2019 Schedule – Machine Learning, Security, Containers, and More

Arm Techcon 2019 Schedule – Machine Learning, Security, Containers, and More

Arm Techcon 2019

Arm TechCon will take place on October 8-10, 2019 at San Jose Convention Center to showcase new solutions from Arm and third-parties, and the company has now published the agenda/schedule for the event. There are many sessions and even if you’re not going to happen it’s always useful to checkout what will be discussed to learn more about what’s going on currently and what will be the focus in the near future for Arm development. Several sessions normally occur at the same time, so as usual I’ll make my own virtual schedule with the ones I find most relevant. Tuesday, October 8  09:00 – 09:50 – Open Source ML is rapidly advancing. How can you benefit? by Markus Levy, Director of AI and Machine Learning Technologies, NXP Over the last two years and still continuing, machine learning applications have benefited tremendously from the growing number of open source frameworks, tools, […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Linux 5.2 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linux 5.2 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linux 5.2 Changelog

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.2 last Sunday: So I was somewhat pre-disposed towards making an rc8, simply because of my travels and being entirely off the internet for a few days last week, and with spotty internet for a few days before that [*]. But there really doesn’t seem to be any reason for another rc, since it’s been very quiet. Yes, I had a few pull requests since rc7, but they were all small, and I had many more that are for the upcoming merge window. Part of it may be due to the July 4th week, of course, but whatever – I’ll take the quiet week as a good sign. So despite a fairly late core revert, I don’t see any real reason for another week of rc, and so we have a v5.2 with the normal release timing. There’s no particular area that stands […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 50 Comments on New Raspberry Pi 4 VLI Firmware Lowers Temperature by 3-5°C

New Raspberry Pi 4 VLI Firmware Lowers Temperature by 3-5°C

Raspberry Pi 4 VLI Firmware Idle Temperature

The other day I tested Raspberry Pi 4 with an heatsink since previous multi-threaded benchmarks clearly made the board throttle when running those without any cooling solution. The guys at the Raspberry Pi Foundation somehow noticed my post, and I received an email from Eben Upton explaining a new Raspberry Pi 4 VLI firmware had “some thermal optimizations that are not installed by default on early production units.” I did not understand VLI at first, but eventually understood this referred to the firmware for VIA VL805 PCIe USB 3.0 controller on the board. The Raspberry Pi Foundation provided me with a test version of the firmware, which they’ll release in the next few days, or weeks after testing is completed. Now if you’re going to test a platform that will throttle due to overheating, it’s very important you do so at constant room temperature. I work in a office where […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Boundary Devices NXP i.MX 8M Mini Board Gets Android 9.0 Firmware

Boundary Devices NXP i.MX 8M Mini Board Gets Android 9.0 Firmware

Nitrogen8M_Mini Android 9.0 NXP i.MX 8M Mini

Beside Debian 9.5, Ubuntu 18.04, the Yocto Project, and Buildroot Linux, NXP i.MX 8M Mini processors also supported Android 8.1 Oreo. But Boundary Devices has just announced their Nitrogen8M_Mini single board computers is now getting support for Android 9.0 Pie operating system. The company worked with Kynetics to release an Android 9.0 evaluation image for the i.MX8M Mini boards based on Linux 4.14.x kernel. You can also get the source code to build it from scratch for your board:

You’ll also need NXP vendor package, which you can install as follows:

The last step is to build the code:

You can find more details, including instructions to flash the image in the getting started guide. The image and source code are only suitable for evaluation, and you’d have to work yourself to get a production-ready version with security patches, field upgrade, and performance improvements, or ask Boundary […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Android Q Beta and Preview SDK Released

Android Q Beta and Preview SDK Released

Android Q ART Performance

Google has just announced the first public release of Android Q dubbed “Beta 1”- for Pixel devices only – as well as the corresponding preview SDK for developers. Android Q is said to bring  additional privacy and security features for users, enhancements for foldables, new APIs for connectivity, new media codecs and camera capabilities, NNAPI extensions, Vulkan 1.1 support, faster app startup, and more. What’s new in Android Q Privacy protections improvements More control over location with multiple options to “allow all the time”, “allow only while the app is in use” (e.g. not while running in the background), and “deny” Users will be able to control apps’ access to the Photos and Videos or the Audio collections via new runtime permissions Android Q will prevent apps from launching an Activity while in the background, relying on high-priority notifications instead Access to non-resettable device identifiers, including device IMEI, serial number, […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 36 Comments on Raspberry Pi Suddenly Not Working? You May Have to Repair your microSD Card

Raspberry Pi Suddenly Not Working? You May Have to Repair your microSD Card

Raspberry Pi Out of Order

Automatic updates are great because they keep your system up-to-date with the latest features and/or security fixes. That’s as long as the firmware is not messed up of course, as Bootlin and others found out when they discovered their Raspberry Pi board(s) had become inaccessible after an ill-fated Raspbian update. What happened is that raspi-copies-and-fills package, which implements optimized low-level memory functions for the ARM processor,  was updated on March 11th, and the update somehow made some programs completely fail to run. This explains why Bootlin guys were unable to access their Raspberry Pi over SSH. The fix is simple, as long as you have physical access to your Raspberry Pi’s micro SD card, remove it from the board, and insert it into your computer, and…: Repair the rootfs partition with

Delete etc/ld.so.preload Unmount the micro SD card, and reinsert it into your Raspberry Pi board. If you’ve installed […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on FOSDEM 2019 Open Source Developers Meeting Schedule

FOSDEM 2019 Open Source Developers Meeting Schedule

FOSDEM 2019

FOSDEM – which stands for Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting – is a free-to-participate event where developers meet on the first week-end of February to discuss open source software & hardware projects. FOSDEM 2019 will take place on February 2 & 3, and the schedule has already been published with 671 speakers scheduled to speak in 711 events themselves sorted in 62 tracks. Like every year, I’ll create a virtual schedule based on some of the sessions most relevant to this blog in tracks such as  open hardware, open media, RISC-V, and hardware enablement tracks. February 2 10:30 – 10:55 – VkRunner: a Vulkan shader test tool by Neil Roberts A presentation of VkRunner which is a tool to help test the compiler in your Vulkan driver using simple high-level scripts. Perhaps the largest part of developing a modern graphics driver revolves around getting the compiler to […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments on Khadas Captain / Edge SBC Review – Part 2: Ubuntu 18.04

Khadas Captain / Edge SBC Review – Part 2: Ubuntu 18.04

Khadas Edge Ubuntu 18.04

I received Khadas Edge Developer Package with Khadas Edge RK3399 module, Khadas Captain carrier board, and several accessories a few weeks ago, and after checking the hardware in the first part of the review, I’ve now taken the time to review software support, specially Ubuntu 18.04 on the board. Khadas Edge / Captain Firmware There are currently four main choices of firmware for Khadas Edge / Khadas Captain: Ubuntu 18.04 OS with LXDE desktop environment @ https://dl.khadas.com/Firmware/Edge/Ubuntu/ Android ROM @ https://dl.khadas.com/Firmware/Edge/Android/ with Android Nougat being a proper release, Android Oreo (available now) a temporary version that will not be supported, and Android P that will be released and supported by Rockchip later on in 2019 Armbian RK3399 for Khadas Edge looks to be work-in-progress right now LibreELEC for playing videos on the platform I decided to focus on Ubuntu 18.04 for this review, and Karl who has his own sample […]